http://www.contracostatimes.com/mld/cct ... 534947.htm

Posted on Tue, May. 09, 2006


Minutemen spread to the north

By Nathaniel Hoffman
CONTRA COSTA TIMES

John Clark spent thousands of dollars in legal fees and several years trying to get his Chilean girlfriend -- now his wife -- into the United States.

So when he saw the Minuteman Project launched in April 2005 to guard the U.S.-Mexico border, he signed up to stop people from sneaking in.

Just back from a weekend along the California-Mexico border repairing border fence and spotting border crossers, the 36-year-old water quality technician from Napa is forming a Northern California Minuteman chapter.

"This country is the United States," Clark said. "I mean, countries are defined by borders. Every other country in the world defends their borders and has people on their borders and doesn't allow illegal immigration."

The Minuteman Civil Defense Corps Inc. is an outgrowth of the original Minuteman Project, a small gathering on the Arizona border in April 2005 that aimed to guard against illegal border crossing, garnering international media attention.

Twenty-three chapters have formed across the country, and last week, Clark secured funding from an anonymous donor in Farmington, N.M., to start one more.

"I believe I'm doing the right thing and I'm a nonviolent person," Clark said, adding that he expects some resistance to the Minutemen in the Bay Area. A quarter of the participants in a recent monthlong Minuteman camp near Boulevard on the California border came from Northern California, and Clark said he knows 15 to 20 people who would join a local group.

Fund raising for the border-control group has risen since large pro-immigrant marches began in March, said Minuteman spokeswoman Connie Hair, going from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars nationally. When the group secures its tax-exempt status, specific fund-raising numbers will become public.

While the movement has become well known, it has been widely criticized as well.

President Bush warned against vigilantism before the original Minuteman Project began in Arizona last year. The Mexican government decried the effort and immigrant advocates have protested and monitored the presence of the Minutemen along the border.

"They've made their language more moderate to make the tent wider," said Isabel Alegria, communications director for the California Immigrant Welfare Collaborative. "But I have no question in my mind that the origins of the Minutemen are racist and anti-immigrant."

Clark first applied online last year to become a Minuteman but no one called him back. More recently he heard about the plan to build a fence on private property along the border and applied again. He paid $50 for a criminal background check and was vetted by California chapter President Tim Donnelly.

"Basically they are trying to make sure you are not a racist in any way, shape or form," Clark said. While some openly racist groups embraced the idea of a civilian border patrol, volunteers are quick to distance themselves from racist positions.

"The whole Hispanic thing is not what motivates me," said Anna Ford of San Jose, an official Minuteman who spent April packing a pistol and radio, keeping an eye out for people walking across from Mexico into remote Boulevard. "For me, we don't know the nature of the people coming across."

Ford and many Minutemen, including founders Chris Simcox and Jim Gilchrist, say the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon spurred them to do something about border security.

Yet frustrations with illegal immigration and with immigrants in general are major factors in their thinking as well.

"Now, five years after 9/11 we are strip-searching Caucasian grandmothers at the airport and we have a wide-open border," said Donnelly, head of the California Minuteman chapter.

Donnelly, a salesman from Twin Peaks, near Lake Arrowhead, said his work with the Minutemen was motivated by the terrorist attacks, but he also traces it to the arrival of immigrant workers in his town, initially brought in to cut trees.

"All of a sudden our whole community changed," he said.

Clark, who speaks Spanish with his two sons and has traveled extensively in South America, said he finds himself hankering for the "good old days."

"The Day of Non-Inmigrantes, that day you know, what it reminded me of, it reminded me of the good old days," Clark said of the May 1 general strike and boycott in which many Latinos skipped work and shopping in protest. "I went shopping at Safeway and there was three checkers open and there was one person, two people in each line, I just flowed right through there, it was great."

Clark met his wife while traveling in Chile in 1996. They corresponded for a while and then he applied for her to come visit and was denied twice. After several years, he successfully applied for a fiancee visa and the two married before the 90-day limit.

She declined an interview.

Clark said his Minuteman chapter, which he hopes to launch in a month, will recruit for the border effort -- the group plans to build its own fence if the federal government does not send troops to guard the border by Memorial Day. But it also will monitor day labor sites, taking down license plate numbers and posting on the Internet the names of people who use day laborers.

Clark, who likens his activity to the Boston Tea Party, has coined the phrase "no taxation with illegal immigration" to show his opposition to paying for services that undocumented immigrants may utilize.

"It's a message to President Bush that, hey, we're down here doing a job that the U.S. government should be doing."


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Nathaniel Hoffman covers immigration and demographics. Reach him at 925-943-8345 or nhoffman@cctimes.com.